“That’s about the size of it.”
“But hornets don’t as a rule carry firearms, so we should be all right.”
“I’m glad you’re confident.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if twenty or thirty jump us we won’t have the firepower to kill them all fast enough. Some might get through. They’ll have machetes, clubs, wrenches, knives.”
“You’ve lost people before like this?”
“Greg, when we started out our group numbered more than thirty. We’re down to ten. See?”
I nodded. “But the hive I found… I didn’t see any hornets. Why wasn’t it guarded like that one back there?”
Even under the burden of bags she shrugged. “A tainted hive.”
“You mean they go bad somehow? Or become corrupted?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Greg. We’ve found hives with a couple of hundred hornets guarding them. They must be the really important ones. Usually the guards number between twenty and thirty. Then again…” She shrugged. “Sometimes there are none. It’s as if the hive’s gone wrong and they abandon it.”
“What actually is a hive, then? What’s its purpose?”
She smiled. “Questions, questions. I don’t know, Greg. We don’t have any professors of biology here, or even a two-bit test-tube jock. We’re just a bunch of kids trying to keep on the warm side of the grave. You follow?”
“But it’s just this hive. The smell of it, and how it looked.. .”
“You’re right. They’re weird. They’re also a God al-mighty mystery…” She looked at me with a sudden sharpness, as if she’d read something in my expression. “What else is there, Greg?”
A strange churning sensation had started in my head. “I can’t explain it… I know it’s impossible, but these hives… I think I’ve seen one before.”
Back at the yard that served as the makeshift camp Michaela had a hurried conversation with Zak and Tony. Then she came across to where Ben and I sat by the fire. “We’ll move on at first light,” she told us. “You best get some sleep now.”
Ben cast some pretty scared-looking glances out into the darkness. “What about the bread bandits, I-I mean hornets? Won’t they come looking for us?”
“It’s unlikely at night. But we’ll be taking turns to keep watch. Yours will be between two and three. So get some sleep now.”
He looked startled that he’d be expected to keep watch.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, “just keep your wits about you, then shout as loud as you can if you see anything. Think you can handle that?”
“Don’t worry.” He looked scared sick. “If I see any-thing you’ll hear me yell, all right.”
She added, “We’ve already loaded the bikes now so we can be away fast.”
“You’ve got bikes?”
“A nice pack of Harley Ds. We found them in a dealer’s showroom a couple of months ago.” She shot me a grin. “You didn’t think we walked everywhere, did you?” With that she pushed back her hair and lay down on a blanket. “By the way, Greg, take the watch after Ben’s.” She grinned again. “Sweet dreams.”
Yeah. As if.
Twenty-two
“One thing we don’t have,” Michaela said the next morning (after a quiet night, thank God), “is a spare machine. You and Ben will have to ride double.”
The bikes looked in good shape, despite the burden of supplies they carried either strapped over fuel tanks, or in a trailer pulled by one monster of a Harley D that Zak rode. I saw the ten-year-old hop onto the trailer like he was riding on the back of a camel.
Ben went up to sit behind Tony. Michaela tied back her hair. “You can ride with me.”
I slipped the rifle across my shoulder. “Where are we headed?”
“Away from here’s the main priority.” She patted the bike’s fuel tank. “But we’re getting low on gas. We need to nose out a new supply. Luckily these things are pretty… shit, Greg, what are you doing?”
I did it in one movement. Slid the rifle from my shoulder, pulled the bolt, aimed, fired. Boy, the sound cracked back from the walls.
Grunting like a wild pig, the man charged from the bushes at the side of the yard. I chambered another round- tried to chamber another round-but the little fuck jammed. Zak and Tony moved fast, pulling guns from holsters. Only they couldn’t shoot because Michaela and I were in the firing line. The grunting guy moved faster- helluva lot faster -eyes blazing with pure ferocity. He bore down on where Michaela sat astride the Harley.
I cursed, jerking the rifle bolt, trying to clear the bastard so I could fire again.
With a grunt that became a full-blooded groan the guy flopped forward, smacking his face into the dirt. He didn’t get up. Come to that, he didn’t move; he didn’t breathe.
I saw the exit wound between his shoulder blades where my bullet had tumbled out at the speed of sound.
“Nice shot,” she said to me in such a matter-of-fact way she could have been complimenting me on my taste in coffee. “But don’t stand there all day. We need to be moving.”
There was no fuss or excitement with these guys. They’d seen it all before. For Ben and me this was something different. Bread bandit, hornet or just a poor goddam refugee with a bad case of the Jumpy- stick him with any name you want, this was the guy I’d just shot through the lungs the second he rushed from the bushes. I hoped my instincts always stayed as keen as that. Hell… in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d do if any of these people who had somehow adopted Ben and me came down with a case of the Jumpy. Especially Michaela. What would I do if I found myself looking at her down the barrel of a gun?
“See?” Michaela called back over her shoulder as we rode through the forest. “We didn’t choose the bikes for their looks. Short of using a battle tank, they’re the only thing that’ll get you through this crap.”
She wasn’t wrong. The roads were totally crapped out. Every few yards there’d be a car or a truck or a bus lying rotting to hell. Many were at the roadside; others spanned the entire highway like they’d been deliberately employed as roadblocks, something that might not be far from the truth. Then there was the usual mess of broken bottles, boxes, fallen trees, human remains. What seemed odd was that skeletons could rot clean of meat and skin, but the clothes didn’t decompose as fast, so you’d find endless sets of articulated human bone still dressed in pants, jackets and shoes, complete with battery-powered watches on bone wrists that had quietly ticked off the seconds all these months. Anyway there was our band weaving ’round the obstacles on the bikes, heading south through the wooded hills in a loose convoy to God alone knew where.
God alone knew where wound up being a barn on a hill-side that overlooked a cluster of lakes. The barn looked untouched since the day of the Fall. At one end bales of straw nearly reached the eaves, while a red tractor stood under a coat of dust at the other end.
“I’ll do the usual,” Tony said before opening the throttle on the bike and tearing off across the field.
Michaela unbuckled the straps that held the supplies on the back of the trailer. “We’ve got this like clock- work,” she told me. “Tony’s checking to make sure that there are no hornets in the neighborhood. We make the camp, build a fire, cook up a meal if we’ve food for the pot. You can help Boy collect firewood. Make sure you take your gun. We still don’t know if we’ve got company out here.”
Everyone knew their job. Everyone worked quickly. They brought the bikes into the barn (out of sight of any hornets who might amble by). Zak got to work with a can opener, opening tins of corned beef fresh from my cabin larder, dumping the blocks of pink meat into a big cooking pot. I saw him for the first time without that cowboy hat. Even though he’d just turned eighteen there wasn’t a hair on his head. He didn’t even possess eyebrows. Shock does weird things to people. Like Boy, who I’d been assigned to help collect firewood (yeah, I was the firewood guy again; there must be something in the way I walked that always got me that particular chore). Boy must have gone through plenty of bad stuff after the Fall. Bad enough to make him ditch his name and kill his old identity as if that might be enough to rid him of all the bad memories, too.
